Where was the IDF on Oct 7? - with Ronen Bergman
One of the questions we repeatedly get from you, our listeners, is - "Where was the IDF on October 7th?" It's a topic that we have strenuously avoided. After the war, there will be a formal commission of inquiry that attempts to understand all that went wrong and why. There will be a time and a place for that.
And yet, as the war in Gaza winds down, and as Israel prepares for another possible war, this question re-emerges. What lessons can be learned? More and more journalists in Israel are exploring the topic. So, we are going to dedicate an episode from time to time in the weeks ahead to try to understand what these journalists are learning.
Our only caveat is that this is a difficult topic to explore - for all the obvious reasons. The information is uneven... there is still an element of fog of war.
When I was in Israel last week, I visited Ronen Bergman in his home in Ramat HaSharon, to have a long conversation about what he has pieced together.
Ronen is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine and Senior Correspondent for Military and Intelligence Affairs for Yedioth Ahronoth, an Israeli daily. Ronen recently won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on this war and the pre-war intelligence failures.
He has published numerous books, including: “Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations”
And also, “The Secret War with Iran"
Ronen is also a member of the Israeli bar (he clerked in the Attorney General’s Office), and has a master’s degree in international relations, as well as a Ph.D. in history from Cambridge University.
Read Ronen's piece in The New York Times here: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/30/world/middleeast/israel-hamas-attack-intelligence.html
Transcript
DISCLAIMER: THIS TRANSCRIPT HAS BEEN CREATED USING AI TECHNOLOGY AND MAY NOT REFLECT 100% ACCURACY.
RB: The intelligence achievement that turned out to be an intelligence disaster, the Jericho Wall, which was a codename for a top secret Israeli operation. In May ‘22, when Israeli intelligence was able to obtain the Hamas detailed war plan, how to initiate the attack, to breach defense in 60 places, and to destroy Israeli defenses and conquer much of the Gaza division that is stretched throughout the border. If you look at the plan and you look at what actually happened, the fence on October 7 was breached in 58 places. So the invasion was an exact materialization of the Jericho Wall, and it was in the hands of the Israelis in ‘May 22.
DS: It's 8:00 PM on Wednesday, June 26th in New York City. It's 3:00 AM on Thursday, June 27th in Israel. One of the questions we repeatedly get from you, our listeners, when you're making suggestions for episodes is, “Where was the IDF on October 7th?” It's a topic that I have strenuously avoided since, well, I figured there'll be a formal commission of inquiry that attempts to understand all that went wrong, and why. And there'll be a time and a place for that. Israel, after all, has a long history of these ruthless commissions of inquiry after wars. And yet, as this war in Gaza winds down, and as Israel prepares for another possible war, the question just keeps reemerging. Where was the IDF on October 7th? What lessons can be learned from the failures, from the breakdowns? More and more Israeli journalists I know are exploring the topic. So we have decided to dedicate an episode from time to time in the weeks ahead to try to understand what these journalists are learning and how the lessons from their reporting could apply to future wars, and future security decisions. My only caveat in exploring this topic is it is a difficult topic for all the obvious reasons. And the information is still uneven. There's still an element of fog of war. So, to get all the details and all the facts will take a long time. That said, when I was in Israel last week, I visited Dr. Ronen Bergman one evening in his home. We sat, had tea, and a long conversation about what he has been piecing together. Ronen Bergman is a staff writer for the New York Times Magazine, and he's a senior correspondent for Military and Intelligence Affairs for Yediot Aharonot, Israel's largest daily newspaper. Ronen also won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on this war and the pre war intelligence failures. Ronen is regarded as one of the most well sourced journalists in Israel when it comes to Israel's intelligence community. He's also published numerous books, including ‘Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations’, which was a New York Times bestseller, and also ‘The Secret War with Iran’. Ronen is also a member of the Israeli Bar. He clerked in the Attorney General's office, and he has a master's degree in international relations, and a PhD in history from Cambridge University in England. Ronen Bergman on: ‘Where was the IDF on October 7th?’ This is Call me Back.
And I'm pleased to welcome to this podcast for the first time my friend Ronen Bergman. We are here somewhere in Tel Aviv, the Tel Aviv area. Thanks for taking the time.
RB: Thanks for the invite. I’ve heard so many very good things about the podcast, happy to be here in person.
DS: Ronen, the reason I wanted to touch base with you while I was in town, what we spend a lot of time on this podcast doing is trying, usually trying to understand what's happening in the war.
We've spent less time trying to figure out how Israel got to October 7th, how October 7th happened. And there's a lot of confusing signals. There's a lot of noise. We try to separate the signal from the noise. There's a lot of agendas, a lot of people who have various equities in trying to explain how Israel got to October 7th.
RB: And a lot of guilt and responsibility.
DS: Yeah.
RB: That people are happy to share with others.
DS: Right. And as our listeners know, I have been steadfast in trying to push off serious discussions of how Israel got to October 7th, because my view is, there's so many political agendas embedded in that, and there's so much finger pointing, and the most important thing is Israel's got to finish, figure out what it's doing. How it's going to fight this war, how it's going to win this war. And there'll be a time for figuring out how October 7th happened at, you know, there'll be a commission of inquiry and all these various processes. And I want to let those play out. That said, I think increasingly what I'm finding in discussions I have with Israelis is understanding how Israel got to October 7th is not only important for purposes of responsibility and understanding what went wrong, it also informs what Israel does in this war. Understanding what it got wrong informs, should inform, what Israel does now in this war. How Israel defines success, ultimately. How Israel deals with other threats in the region. How Israel can have confidence in its intelligence capabilities. So there are a lot of real time issues that we're dealing with, which is why I wanted to get into some of this with you. And by my lights, there are two parts to this question. The first part is the decade, decade plus long policy that was government policy that was undergirded by a series of assumptions about Gaza and Hamas and the threat, that it seems like Israel got wrong. And then there's operationally at a very practical level, what happened on October 7th, the failure for Israel, A, to maintain security at the border and B to respond to the situation more rapidly than it did. But before that, you've been covering Israel's intelligence services for decades. How would you compare the role that intelligence and the intelligence community plays in Israel compared with other countries?
RB: On the 2nd of June, 1948, in the midst of this horrible war of independence, two weeks after Israel was established, two weeks after the IDF was established, the situation was dire. David Ben-Gurion found the time to get some people secretly to his new office in a shack in Kiryat, and established the Israeli intelligence community. He was like a prophet. He realized he was one of the only who truly believed that Israel will win that war. The CIA thought that, you know, the Arabs will slaughter the Jews in two weeks. He said ‘we will win’, but he also realized that the IDF that is mostly reservist cannot be stationed on the border of Israel throughout the year because there will be no state, no prosperity, no economy, and that this needs to be bartered, replaced with intelligence, top intelligence from inside enemy ranks that would bring a sufficient alert in order to recruit the reservist. And what the enemy is planning, what are his weapons and his tactics and later what the terrorist organization are doing. The intelligence is taking, I think, the most decisive and critical role in the history of Israel, more than any other country, at least in the Western world. Dictatorships are different because it's part of preserving the regime, but in Israel, there is no historical important decision making. No historical turn. Nothing important that happened without the significant imprint of the intelligence. Not all of it was good. Sometimes the Israeli James Bond looks more like Inspector Clouseau. But it was always there and very, very important. And also always the arching, overarching thought of necessity. I once had a conversation with someone who was holding the Iranian file, the Iranian operations of the CIA. We thought, what is like the difference between CIA and Israeli intelligence? In general, it's that additional thought with which the employees of Israeli intelligence are going to work every morning. Like everybody, they want to feel happy. They want to fulfill their, their selves, they want to earn some money, but, they have an additional thought. This is necessity. And if an operation, a CIA operation in Malaysia goes wrong, it's bad. But, most cases, I know September 11th, exceptionally, most cases would not affect US citizens. Here, I once met in the cyber lab of Shin Bet, a person that left Motorola with second degree from the Technion. Leaving Motorola, her salary was cut into half the day she went to work for Shin Bet. And I asked her, like being, that was how I said, Why? You leave a good job with the prosperity, with the prospect of a lot of money, for this? With many shifts, you don't see your family now? She said, Yes, and I'm very happy. I said, Why? She said, First of all, it's only action here. And I'm one of the first of the few to see this. Second, if I invent something that works, it will be implemented immediately. In Motorola, maybe, maybe not. And third, the flip side of the first one, the dark side of that coin is that if I don't perform well, then tomorrow, someone might get killed. Maybe even someone I know, maybe even my family. The necessity. It was always there, but something went really wrong in the month, in the days, and month, and years before October 7th. It's not about bad intention. It's not about nonchalant or some kind of apathy towards that. But it's, and it's not about a certain person that needed to, you know, put the needle somewhere else. It's a total collapse of the intelligence community and the military of Israel.
DS: Complacency, self confidence, over self confidence?
RB Vanity.
DS: Vanity?
RB:Vanity. It's the thought that those are just a bunch of some Gazans. Maybe Iran, like they are considered to be sophisticated. Hezbollah, they were seen as the main threat, but those Gazans, what can they do? And this is the price of, of vanity. Israeli intelligence believed in something they called intelligence supremacy. And again, it's unbelievable, the similarities between things that happened in the Yom Kippur war and was, were never researched and understood. And what happened on October 7. On April, 1973, the head of Israeli military intelligence, major general Eli Zeira promised the cabinet that he is able to give them 24 to 48 hours alert before an Egyptian attack. Why was he able? Because he had something he called the policy, the insurance policy. The insurance policy, were in that time, sophisticated devices attached to main, main encrypted communication line of the Egyptian military. And it was the Israelis were certain that if an attack is coming, then they will speak over those lines, and the Israelis were able to hear. But they didn't. A year before, they captured a telephone pole by one of the main highways, hidden, it looked like a regular one, but hidden, a bugging device, intercepting their communication. So they realized, even if they didn't find the others, if they didn't find the others, they realized their capabilities. In 2018, Hamas suspected a group of NGO health workers, Arabs. But, something in their story didn't fit. And it turned out that they are undercover, top secret platoon of Israeli intelligence. And they had to run away, firing their way out. And one Israeli fighter was killed in the fire and some others were wounded, but they left behind and all the others were able to flee on the heavy fire, massive fire from, from the IDF that came to help. But they left behind a lot of equipment. And the IDF tried to bomb the equipment, but did not destroy enough. And soon after Hamas was deducting the, the obvious what they were doing. They were trying to hook into a Hamas encrypted communication. And so the belief in Israel was of intelligence supremacy. Like what Eli Zeira told the cabinet in April, 1973, that if Hamas is planning something, they will do that over channels that Israel censors monitor. And if the censors do not monitor, it means that they will not attack. Guess what? They either used, this is yet to be investigated, but they either used the channel for deception, meaning feeding the channel with false information, or they just didn't speak. Remember, I said that…
DS: They did it all analog.
RB: Analog. They had people meeting among themselves.
DS: Maybe just set the table by explaining to me, what were the basic assumptions embedded in the Israeli security establishment and the Israeli political establishments approach to Hamas, Gaza, the threat from Hamas, in the years, the decade plus before October 7th.
RB:This is one of the, of course, the main questions and in the intelligence world, this will be the question of intentions. What is the mindset? What are the plans? What are the intentions of the enemy? Or in this case, the enemy can be concise to the gap between the right and the left ear of Yahya Sinwar. Because since 2000, sort of 15, 16, Yahya Sinwar is almost the only important voice in Hamas. And this is in spite of some of his rivals there trying to diminish his power, but it was clear to Israel that it's all about Sinwar.
DS: And that's beginning when? When did they know it's all about Sinwar? Soon after his release from prison?
RB: No, but soon after his release from prison, he and another person named Mushta, that is one of his closest associates, that was released with him from prison in the Shalit deal, they were starting an offense inside Hamas in order to gain more and more power. And then came Defensive Edge of 2014.
DS: So just for our listeners. So that's the 2014 Gaza Hamas-Israel war lasted about 50 days. It was the last major IDF operation in Gaza before the war of October 7th.
RB: And, Sinwar was not the leader of Hamas in Gaza. It was Haniyeh.
DS: During protective edge.
RB: Yes. And then, the Military commander of Hamas, that did not perform as they expected, Mohamed Deif, he sent an apology To Qasem Soleimani, the head of Quds Force.
DS: In Iran.
RB: In Iran. And said, it's not us, the Qassam Brigade, the military wing of Hamas that are to be blamed. It's the politicians.
DS: So they believe they failed with Protective Edge in 2014, and Mohammad Deif had what role at the time?
RB: The same role, the military commander of Hamas.
DS: He was the military commander of Hamas.
RB: The head of Qassam Brigade.
DS: And he sends a message to
RB: Soleimani.
DS: Soleimani and Iran saying, we failed, but it's not our fault. It was the political decision maker.
RB: Yeah.
DS: Which is Haniyeh.
RB: Which is Haniyeh. Now, of course he apologized because the Iranians were supplying them with massive aid in all fields and military buildup. So he said, this is why we didn't perform. And we didn't perform, he said, because they did not allow us, the politicians, to attack first, to come in an imminent surprise, strategic attack against Israel.
DS: Just for our listeners, Mohamed Deif and Yahya Sinwar are, to this day, close associates, basically, co-heads of Hamas.
RB: So in spite of two years after Sinwar, elected to be the political leader of Hamas in Gaza, he remains part of the military infrastructure. And very close to the leaders of, the military leader, and basically, and now we know this from protocols and notes from meetings that were taking place before October 7 and were now captured in Gaza, Hamas records that he was the military commander and the political leader. He was leading everything. And those two conclusions that Hamas needs to attack in a total surprise and Hamas needs to disregard the politicians, were totally implemented on October 7th. But all of that was happening outside the eyesight of Israeli intelligence. And let me just jump to the end, which is the clearest point, I think, that gives an understanding to this blindness. And this is in a meeting with the Israeli prime minister, of all the leaders of the intelligence and the military. And on October 2nd, it's a Monday. And they have a unanimous reading of Hamas. The prime minister, the national security advisor, and all the leaders of Israeli intelligence.
DS: This is what date?
RB: October 2nd. Five days before the war. And they all, with no dispute, with no one standing and saying, well, maybe it's different. They all say, Hamas is deterred, weakened. In Hebrew, it sounds better. And after that, this was a secret meeting, of course, but the National Security Advisor of Israel, Tzachi Hanegbi, went on radio that day and gave publicity to this assessment. He said, Hamas are deterred and will be deterred for many years after the previous war, the previous round, which is in May 21. So, the conception as they call it today in Israel.
DS: The conceptia.
RB: The conceptia. Which is a derogatory term that was borrowed from the investigation of the Yom Kippur war. Now to have a conception is not a bad thing. What is bad is not to see that it changed. The conception was, Israel has been facing more or less one kind of enemy, in the last three decades. They called themselves the resistant front. Israel calls them the jihadist front or the radical front. So Iran, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hamas, and the other, all the other militias that they support. By nature, they are jihadist. But, one of the main pillars of Israeli defense strategy was that all the component of that front, even if they are calling for suicide bombers, even if they are nonchalant to the death of thousands, even from their own people, they are not suicidal themselves. This was the belief. Once they get an organization, or a territory, or a country they rule, they will not risk the destruction of that area, and therefore the destruction of the achievement they already have, in an all out war with Israel. DS: And this is at what level of the organization of Hamas, that the theory of the Israeli security intelligence establishment was, at what level is that view that they're practical, they're survivalists, and they're practical and they're not messianic, they actually want to build, hang onto territory, quote unquote, govern, preserve, they're not reckless and suicidal. So that's up and down the organization?
RB: Up and down, of course, but this is a totalitarian organization, totalitarian rule of a small country, the Gaza Strip. But still, after, according to this reading, after doing so much and taking, siezing control in 2007 of a small country, but still like a state that they control, they wouldn't risk an Israeli invasion and all out war with a mighty enemy and losing everything they achieved. And there was a belief. Now, if you look at what is happening now in Lebanon, though Nasrallah Hezbollah are fighting Israel, but they are also keeping the threshold of not going to an all out war. So this theory that Iran also kept some kind of boundaries. So this theory works, but sometimes as it turned out in October 7, it doesn't. And while Israel felt that it is able to find some kind of solution, some kind of settlement, some kind of ways to stabilize the horrible relations with the Gazans and Hamas, the Hamas was planning something else. Now here's the, if you want to have a more colorful way to describe it. On October 1st, 2018, five years before the war, Sinwar gave an interview to Yedioth Ahronoth. It was Francesca, an Italian reporter.
DS: Right. It was a joint interview for Yedioth Ahronoth and the Republic in Italy.
RB: He knew that this was for Yedioth. So by itself, this was a step. And then you read the text, you know, he's speaking about, he doesn't, he says, we don't need more wars. I'm keen to have all Gazans and Gazan child, children go to swim at the beach, there are Palestinian children in Gaza that never went to the beach. It's, it's not normal. You hear a much more than you expect. Now, here's the question. Was he lying in that interview and it was planning this all along? Or he changed through time because whatever happened, you know, the Saudi deal that he wanted to, uh, disrupt or he wanted to free the prisoners and couldn't do that with. This is one of the main questions that is deeply occupying Israeli intelligence now.
DS: But in that interview, in that article, did Israeli intelligence believe at the time, Oh, he's, he's thinking more practically. He's thinking more like a, like a leader, like a mayor who's responsible for running a town or a city than he is a jihadist?
RB: Some did, and it looked reasonable. Also, it coincides with the policy initiated by Prime Minister Netanyahu, who was asking Qatar to help fund the Gazan government. Which is, as we know, is controlled by Hamas. And in many occasions he spoke about Hamas. He says Hamas is an asset like Netanyahu, some political analysts believe because he didn't want to have the Palestinian Authority as a one representative for the Palestinian people. He thought that having those two divided rule would be better. This policy, bringing the money from Qatar was defended and pushed, and trusted by most parts of Israeli intelligence. Because they believed what Sinwar said.
DS: This policy, meaning of getting funds to impoverished Palestinians, to those Palestinians in Gaza who were impoverished, they needed to get funding to them, and Qatar was a vehicle through which to do it.
RB: Yeah, but of course, even if Hamas was not stealing the money, which soon they found it is doing, at least partly, money is fungible. When Hamas doesn't need to pay those $100 a month to a teacher, and Qatar is doing that, then Hamas can take the $100. But what is interesting, is that the Qatari funding was not secret. Everybody saw it. And when Prime Minister Bennett came to be the prime minister, he wanted to cut that, the military and the intelligence, parts of the intelligence didn't want, because they were fearing escalation because it was clear that now that sort of the strip is sort of addicted to the money. And if you cut that, you will end up with riots. That Hamas will of course inflate. And so, they had some kind of a compromise and they stopped the cash, but they continue, they continue to send the money over. In retrospect, I think that there's no one that does not regret and Yossi Cohen, the chief of Mossad, when, before he left office, he, who was mediating the connection with Qatar, he said, it's getting out of control and we should stop, and his successor, Dadi Barnea, in the meetings with the new elected government, so the Bennett government, and then the Lapid government and then the Netanyahu government, he objected, but he was overruled and as late as Yom Kippur, 28th of September, he meets in Qatar with the ambassador for Gaza, El Ahmadi, and he gives him the okay, which he objected. But of course the civil servant, he takes the Israeli policy and the orders he got from Netanyahu, from Prime Minister Netanyahu, he said, we are continuing. They need to renew this after like periodically. And one of the assumptions yet to be fully proof, but already in the intelligence collected from Gaza, they are more than just hints that Sinwar was playing on that card. He was making sure that Israel will be fed all the time with good signs, hope, some ceasefire. Now the Qataris who were also misled, they gave Israel the same, the same signs. And more than that. The political bureau of Hamas that is based in Qatar, they were convinced that this is going this way because Sinwar realized that if he wants to make this a total surprise, that the condition for the success of this operation is a total surprise, that if he wants to have total surprise, he needs to keep the secret among few associates in Gaza. And not communicate that, in any way to anyone else, because Israel, maybe it's, you know, ironic or absurd, Israel has a much better intelligence on far away enemies than on Hamas. If they would be updating Nasrallah or Iran, there's a strong chance that Israel would know, but he kept that. And also he knew that the political bureau will stop him, because there was a clash, and Israel understood there was a clash of what is Hamas, like Hamas, is it a governing organization or is it a jihadist? And he, he decided what is the outcome of this debate or dispute between him and the politicians. He just forgot to send them the email. That he decided that he just decided for them. Now. So this is about intentions. Well, everything I said now, everything we discussed is about the intention, the the total misreading of Sinwar's intentions. Whether he was telling the truth on that interview, and changed through time.
DS: Or whether it was a fake.
RB: Or whether it was a fake.
DS: That only tells you whether or not he'd been going back for, say, a decade, or he had been planning this since sometime after 2018.
RB: But you can explain a mistake in reading someone's mind. You don't have the debugging device to attach to his mind.
DS: Not yet. Not yet, yeah.
RB: And if you keep a secret among five or six people. Then, you know, you can understand why this was not picked up. But then there's the second biggest failure, which is the total misunderstanding, misreading of Hamas capabilities. And this is where the intelligence achievement, the turn to be an intelligence disaster, the Jericho Wall, which was a codename for a top secret Israeli operation in May ‘22. When Israeli intelligence was able to obtain the Hamas war plan. The detailed war plan, how to initiate the attack to breach defense in 60 places, and to destroy Israeli defenses and conquer much of the Gaza division that is stretched throughout the border. If you look at the plan, and you look at what actually happened, the fence on October 7 was breached in 58 places. So the invasion was an exact materialization of the Jericho Wall, and it was in the hands of the Israelis in May ‘22. Now, so what happened? What happened was that Israel considered Jericho Wall, they called it a compass for the building of force. So not an attacking plan for something they can do, but a plan for something they want to do, one day. DS: It was aspirational, but it wasn't, by the analysis of the Israeli leadership, it wasn't an operational plan to be implemented anytime in the near future.
RB: So while they, the plan is about to bridge the fence in 60 places with 24 Nukhba platoons spread all over and more forces from other parts of Hamas. Israel believed, that they could breach the fence maximum in two places with maybe 70 Nukhba terrorists. So 3,000 people in 60 places that the plan, and Israel says maximum two with 70 people. It's, it's not the same universe.
DS: Right.
RB: And why did Israel believe that Hamas cannot execute Jericho? It's, this is one of the key questions. Generally, It's again, a great Israeli achievement turned into a disaster. After 2014, the Defensive Edge war, the Israeli intelligence and military realized that there is a problem. The problem is Hamas is planning a massive attack using tunnels going from Gaza into Israel. During 2014, the, the, the extent, the depths of the problem became clear because Suddenly, some terrorists popped up by Sderot and killed soldiers, and thanks to some Israeli troops, they were stopped. But it was clear that intelligence would not be enough to supply a full information about all the tunnels, that there needs to be some other solution. And then, when seeing the cross border tunnels as the main threat, the Israeli defense establishment recruited itself. And they came with a solution. The solution was a subterranean fence going, they call the salaric fence, with sensors, massive concrete and reinforced concrete going from the ground until minus 70, 70 meters. And that was concluded in 2020. And soon after the Israeli intelligence
DS: Covering the entire
RB: The entire
DS: Border.
RB: Hemisphere of the border.
DS: Uh-huh.
RB: Massive, massive operation.
DS: Now Hamas must have known Israel was doing this. They could see it.
RB: Yeah.
DS: They could see the construction.
RB: And soon after. Israel realized, Israeli intelligence learned, that Hamas just realized that they cannot cross it, that it's not breachable. So, from the Israeli point of view, they were enchanted, too enchanted, by this achievement. They said, okay, Hamas was planning an invasion, the invasion was planned to be with tunnels dug into the territory of Israel. Now they cannot do that. So the only thing they can do, 1 is to try and invade Israel above ground. But then, of course, Israel will see them. And defense had seven different mechanisms of detection and killed, automatic guns and scouts and computers and robots and all sorts of so, if they come above ground, Israel will stop them. So they cannot. They can only send two platoons of 70 people in two places. That's it. And they call it in Hebrew Pshita, which means a raid. The danger, the risk was defined as Pshita, as raid, and not Plisha, invasion. And even this small euphemism, the small unit in the Gaza brigade, the Gaza division, in the intelligence cell that was supposed to track Hamas plans for an invasion was called raid cell, meaning,
DS: meaning that the outfit within Israeli intelligence that was assigned to monitor this possible operation, the cell was, the nomenclature was referring to it as a raid rather than an invasion. RB: Because nobody thought that an invasion can happen.
DS: And this comes back to your point about the mindset. The mindset was. Invasion can’t happen, and then they probably didn't want it to happen.
RB: They didn't want, and so they, maybe they have plans on the paper of some kind of a desired, so Jericho, desired capability one day, but they don't want, and they cannot. And if they try, defense will stop them. You know, on the second day of the Yom Kippur War, Moshe Dayan, the Israeli Minister of Defense, At noon, came to see Golda Meir. The disaster was not yet fully known, but it was clear that it's not going the way that Israel wanted. And he said, Mrs. Prime Minister, I was wrong. I thought that the Egyptians don't have a chance to cross the Suez Canal. There are papers of Israeli intelligence written before this current war that are using the same language of intelligence documents that were written before October ‘73. It's like some kind of a devilish, hideous angel came and make those people write the same words, you know, 10 minutes past 3:00 AM in the night between 6 and 7, the Shin Bet, so the Israeli domestic secret service, is initiating a, sending a telegram to some of the units of the military in the Shin Bet. He says, we have some worrying or concerning signs, that Hamas is going to emergency status, meaning attack, but it is our assessment that Sinwar does not want escalation. If you look at what the intelligence produced in the morning of the 7th, it's exactly the same, same language. And so what Israel didn't do, was to, to, to seek and, and check whether Hamas was able to close the gap and reach the capability to execute Jericho wall. There were some people, you know, on a lower level of the intelligence who said, we are monitoring this exercise, this drill. We see that they're improving. We see that they're closing the gap. But at the end, there was no one to challenge both. No one like serious alert with intelligence, the challenge, both, the assessment on the intentions of Sinwar and the assessment on the capabilities of Hamas.
DS: Can we just stay on the capabilities? Because. There's two aspects to the tunnel system. There's the tunnel system, the part of the tunnel system that's able to penetrate Israel. And then there's the tunnel system that we've learned all too much about since October 7th, which is this 350 miles underground in Gaza, this labyrinth where Hamas can command a war from, hide hostages in, uh, store weapons in. How aware was Israel of the depth and breadth of this tunnel system before October 7th? Not the part that penetrates Israel, but just the, the, the city of tunnels inside Gaza.
RB: So I think looking at this reflects the quantity and quality of intelligence in general, Israel had about Hamas. I once wrote that the unsuccessful attempt to understand where is Gilad Shalit should be used, should have been used by Israel as a sign of warning. Now, Gilad Shalit, a live soldier, was kept in Gaza for five and a half years. During that time, Israel didn't know where, where he is, and the extent of non successful attempts. Not even to rescue, but even know where he is was so deep that they felt that they were sure that he's not in Gaza anymore. Because if he was in Gaza, they would pick up something, because someone alive creates noise. You need to feed him, to guard him, to change his bed sheets, etc. Even when he was back to Israel and debriefed about everything he remembered, even now they don't even, they don't know where he was kept for most of the time. This is just one small example. Gaza is near Israel. Israel has been monitoring that with all the different sensors, humans and
DS: But you can't build all that infrastructure without military equipment and cement and supplies and experts and construction workers and engineers and like I said, it's, it's like building a subway system.
RB: Yup. So, so at a certain point when Israel realized that the crossing tunnels are no longer problem, they were still very much worried about the tunnels from Egypt, but this is not something Israel could do something militarily against. It can, you know, try to negotiate with Egypt with small success. But all the rest seem to the Israeli leadership, political, military, and intelligence as not very important. Because if they want to continue digging tunnels because, I don’t know, they are bored, or they just want to continue, what's the meaning of that? And nobody thought that maybe the explanation is not just because they are bored, or because they work under orders, or they need to be busy. But because those are not attacking, not offensive tunnels, but defensive tunnels, to maintain redundancy of Hamas in case of Israeli invasion. Now, if Hamas knows Israel, understands Israel as much as they say, then the conclusion of that would be that Hamas understands that Sinwar understands that Israel would invade Gaza only in a very, very, very extreme case. That Hamas does something very, very bad to Israel. The almost obvious example or conclusion would be that they are preparing for that moment.
DS: So they knew these tunnels were being built. They just didn't, they just didn't make military sense to Israel from it in terms of them being used in an offensive way.
RB: Yeah, they didn't know enough. In fact, when Israel entered the Gaza Strip, a story, my colleague at the time, Patrick Kingsley and myself published it. When Israel entered. The Gaza strip, you made the calculation to miles. They thought the assessment was that there was 150 kilometers of tunnels. It turned out that there are at least 750. So, the extent of the mistake there are 157 kilometers just under Khan Yunis, this small outskirt of, of refugee camps. And when you see what the IDF has said. Not just publicly for PR, but among the IDF, among the leaders of the, among the chief of staff, about the results of the bombing of the tunnels in the last war with Hamas and, uh, Guardians of the Wall in May ‘21. One of the leaders of Israeli defense establishment said as late as January ‘23. Sinwar doesn't want to attack Israel, not because there is a stick or carrot. No carrot. But he knows, Sinwar, after what we did to him in Guardians of the Wall in May ‘21, that he will not have the subterranean network in the next war. Now, I'm sure that that person did not say that just because he invented that or he reflected some wishful thinking. This was based on a realm of reports of Israeli intelligence after that war. Now, it's still, time will tell us, and hopefully more documents, if Israel was just poor with the collection of intelligence or someone in the military lied or made the reports better than they were. But it's clear that Sinwar, from the same bombing, the same operation, the same raid, deducted the opposite conclusions, that the tunnels sustained. They made some clear and fast deduction of of conclusions. They added more zigzags to the tunnels, more blast doors. And what Israel discovered was not just longer, but vast and stronger, and bigger and smarter than anything. They didn't know that there was a Chinese machine that can build a tunnel as wide as a truck. I visited that tunnel. They found a video of Ahmed Sinwar, the brother of who was running the whole campaign of the tunnels, the whole project, in his private car going through the tunnel. And, and there's so much more. And because Israel thought this is not a problem, they did not prepare the necessary gear and methods. And it turned out to be very, even when you discover a tunnel, even when you declare it free from booby traps, it just turned out to be very, very difficult to destroy them. You need to use special means and it's very slow. And the idea of prediction now that even if Israel controls the Gaza Strip, It could take like up to three years to destroy everything.
DS: You published an op-ed the day before October 7th on the 50th anniversary of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Retired Major General Aharon Farkas, former head of military intelligence, also published a piece, both pieces in Yedioth Ahronoth about lessons learned, legacy of,
RB: Lessons not learned.
DS: Lessons not learned from, um, the Yom Kippur War. And their relevance for today. This was published the day before October 7th. What were those lessons learned or not learned? And to what extent did they rear their head, their ugly head, 24 hours after these pieces were published?
RB: So both of us. ended our stories, our op-eds with a warning that Israel is exposed to another strategic surprise attack by one or more than one of its enemies. When 24 hours later, Hamas attacked, people called me and called our major generals Farkas and said, how did you know? How did you predict you were the only ones. Now with respect to the credit, we didn't know anything. Nobody knew. What we did know is that the lessons from the Yom Kippur War, that this war was not investigated right. One day we'll tell the story of the cover up of the investigation.
DS: Of the Yom Kippur War?
RB: Of the Yom Kippur War.
DS: But there was a whole, there was the commission of inquiry.
RB: There was no investigation into the intelligence blunder, which is the main, you know, component there, as now, the investigation panel headed by former chief justice Agranat. They came to the conclusion that few people made the very wrong decisions that the head of military intelligence, head of the assessment for military intelligence, that they had to make other decisions. And therefore, part of the responsibility lies on their social shoulders. But what they did not investigate, they did something that many journalists are doing, and are doing it about October 7 as well, personification of history. He is to be blamed, if that person on that minute would do something different, if you would be able to get into the time machine and go back, and force his hand to do this and not that, that it's all going to be okay. That prevented a real investigation of the war, not the fact that they made the wrong call. That's clear. But what led those high rank, smart and patriotic, of course, they didn't want Israel to be attacked. What made them, and what made them was a very, I think the most sophisticated deception plan in the history of intelligence, maybe until October 7, led by President Sadat. Because the sin of vanity, because Israel, Israelis, the defense establishment, their ego, the military, the political, they didn't believe that, that Sadat and Egypt can perform. There was an investigation in 1974 in Mossad asking the question of whether this was a deception, smart deception. And they came to the surprising conclusion that the Mossad did not fell, did not follow any deception. Why? Because the Egyptians are not capable of executing deception. So I explained why I was not bluffed, because I say that the other side cannot bluff me. It's like a, it's a logic circle that collapsed into itself.
DS: Right, right.
RB: And because this was never investigated, never. And one day we will publish how the whole thing was covered up. But the interim conclusion of both Major General Farkas, one of the most experienced intelligence officers in Israel and myself, that the sin of vanity, because Israel did not investigate and deduct the real reason, and made the real conclusion. It's almost doomed to fall again into the same pit. And 24 hours later it happened. So we spoke about intentions, spoke about capabilities, which sort of mixed together when they were supposed to be totally separate. And the third part of the failure is a total misunderstanding of the decision and the steps to execute October 7th, the specific day. But of course the specific day was, this was planned long ago, and there was a road taken. Of course we did speak in the last night.
DS: When do you think they settled on, we're definitely going to do this, and this is the approximate date we'll do it? Based on your sources.
RB: There were ideas of Sinwar to execute that much before.
DS: There were ideas of Sinwar to execute the plan.
RB: The plan.
DS: Earlier.
RB: Much earlier.
DS: Mhmm.
RB: And they were delayed from different reasons. It's clear that they went to do that on a holiday. And on Shabbat. Do you recall another war that, another surprise that started on Shabbat, in a holiday?
DS: Right. For our listeners, that's, that's the Yom Kippur War in 1973. Yom Kippur War.
RB: Yom Kippur War. And because they knew that the shifts are reducted, the shift in the military, that people are going, that the whole week is a, is a week of, uh, of vacation. There is still team, secret teams in the military reading documents. They, they captured something like two and a half million pages. It will take some time to read, but what I understand is that there were a few dates and then in the last month there was fixation on October 7th and there were many steps that were taken. And none of them was interpreted right. But the unbelievable thing happened. There were like maybe 10,000 Hamas members that were involved in the preparation that night. 10,000. So 10,000 people are taken from their homes in the middle of the night. Most of them are being told that this is a drill. They are being told just much later that it's not.
DS: But 10,000 people plucked away from their homes. Means that multiply that by five or seven people per person. You've got
RB: To see that the guys is gone.
DS: So that's like 60 to 70,000 people know something's going on.
RB: Yeah. There's even an intercept. Shin bet had an intercept of someone from the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, calling his buddy from Hamas. I said, what the hell is going on? Why is everybody said, no, no, it's just a drill. Maybe he believed in that, but. We also know now that there were a lot, there was a lot of intelligence. And again, I don't want to be seen as, you know, the wisdom of retrospect. It's all, it always happens in intelligence blunders that you take all the material, all the intelligence, and you found this group of Middle Eastern training for flights in that place that was
DS: Trust me, I worked in the Bush administration and, I mean, at least as far as Iraq is concerned, which is the part I worked on. In retrospect, you have all this data and you have all these memos that if they were all examined and believed to be a hundred percent accurate, in the moment, they would have told you a lot. Of course, that's not the way intelligence analysis and collection and evaluation works.
RB: And there's something in Israeli intelligence called an alert model. Which basically, trying to put this crucial need to get alert in some kind of perimeter, some kind of framework, which basically says, here are signs that something might be happening, you know, preparation of hospitals, someone of Hamas going underground, some vehicles moving from here to there. And for this reason or the other, and I think the main reason was, was vanity, was because nobody thought that it could happen. There was no such model vis a vis Hamas. There was a model with Hezbollah, but there was no model with Hamas. So even when signs were picked, some signs were picked on that night. Even when they saw that there is a Hamas commander going under ground, even when some communication that is reserved for emergency network for Hamas started operating, they still saw this as yet another exercise. Because in an exercise, they also operated the same thing. Let me tell you a story. Israeli intelligence believed for the first weeks that the recruitment of the Nukhba through the night was done by foot from door to door. The commanders knocked on the door, said, wake up, take your gear and come. We have an exercise, a night exercise. But when Israeli intelligence briefed the CIA about UNRWA employees that were involved in the attack on October 7, and the CIA came to meet with the head of, current head of military intelligence, Major General Aharon Haliva. They were, they asked and they were given with some of the facts, of the proofs. And one day I met with the source, and he gave me that briefing that was given to the, to the CIA. And I'm reading it. And in that I'm reading that One of the RA teachers who is also a Hamas militant, the Nukhba member, he's getting an SMS at 11:00 PM.
DS: Nukhba is the elite military.
RB: It's, yeah, it's the front raiding force of Hamas. Those 3,000, uh, that are arranged in 24 platoons. So he's getting an SMS saying, you come to the place where it's agreed to come before the raid. And don't forget to bring the RPG that you kept in your house. I read this and I look at the source. He says, why are you looking at me? I said, you know why I'm looking at you? And then of course we are on audio. So people cannot see this. You know, he does this sort of, you know, emoji.
DS: Yeah, yeah. Hands up.
RB: What can I do?
DS: Right.
RB: Because I was looking at him, because apparently, at least some of the Nukhba got their alerts through text messages. Not just from people knocking. It's very hard to intercept people knocking at doors. But in any case, 10,000 people are involved. At least 100,000 know that their relative is out of the house. There's a lot of movement and Israel almost doesn't know anything. And the little signs that were picked up are either interpreted as another drill. So imitating war, but not war. And the most was to say, well, maybe there's going to be a raid. A Nukhba breach of defense in two places, 70 people. Okay. It's horrible if they succeed and so,
DS: But we can handle it.
RB: We can handle it. But it's not, Israel didn't have a real war plan in case of invasion. David Ben Gurion, who appointed himself as the first Israeli, not just prime minister, but also minister of defense. He created the Israeli defense strategy, or Israeli military strategy. It is based on three pillars. It sounds much better in Hebrew or transcript. Harta'ah, Hatra'ah, Achra'ah, which means deterrence, alert, and total swift victory. The whole of what Israel was about was getting the intelligence. If the deterrent didn't work and the enemy is about to launch an attack, to get the intelligence and whatever happens, an immediate shift of the battlefield to enemy territory. And so the Gaza border was not prepared for it. Nobody thought this is happening. This could be happening. You know, when I was sitting here. And I saw the first social media clips that Hamas was sending from inside Israel. It was like 8:30 in the morning, I think, so two hours after. And when I first saw it, I thought this is a, I told the person who said this is just a fabrication. It's just, it's not true. Because nobody, like, nobody could believe. And this is this also this third part, the disbelief in the capability and the almost zero knowing of what is happening. That also led to very poor preparations of the IDF that was enchanted by the, this, this wall, this, this fence that was supposed to stop everything. There were high rank officials, high rank officers in the Southern Command who said, nobody, nothing can cross the fence. It’s invincible.
DS: If Israel's theory of the case, if Israel's theory of Hamas had not been, they're practical, they're survivalist, they are not willing to risk at all, they're not willing, they're not messianic, they're into preservation, preservation of their lives, they're not jihadist. If the theory had not been that, if their theory had been, no, no, no, no, they're jihadist. That mindset is pervasive up and down the ranks. It is what we know it is today. The quotes you saw from Sinwar recently saying he's willing to sacrifice enormous Palestinian bloodshed to advance their goals. If Israel had known all that,
RB: Then the reasonable conclusion would be that Israel cannot wait. Of course, a reasonable conclusion would be that someday Hamas can surprise Israel. If someone would change the whole strategy and believe that Hamas might actually do that, meaning their intention is to continue with Jihad, even with the pride, even with performing a suicide attack against themselves, even with risking their own rule, their own lives. But the, the achievement of, of getting control over this land, then of course Israel could not have waited to believe that Hamas is deterred. Was the very comfortable conclusion for all the different actors in Israel. It was comfortable for Prime Minister Netanyahu, who could say, well, why should I negotiate with the Palestinian Authority? That's not the only representative of the Palestinian people. And of course, nobody asked him to negotiate with Hamas, but it was also comfortable for the military and intelligence because another conclusion would force them to act. And this is not easy. And I, you know, in retrospect, of course, everybody wants, but let's take Hezbollah. Hezbollah has been stockpiling hundreds of thousands of rockets and missiles. Israel know about that. So the conclusion is what to launch war, even if it's not necessary, like if it's not forced on Israel? And there was one person, the then the Minister of Defense, uh, Avigdor Lieberman, who wrote in 2016, wrote a detailed, top secret memo with, uh, A very precise prediction of what will happen. And he demanded to switch the priorities and put Gaza first, Lebanon second, and invade Gaza and destroy Hamas.
DS: Preemptively.
RB: Preemptively.
DS: Because he had been concerned that there was a version of what we now know to be October 7th in the, governing the mindset of Hamas.
RB: And he, he demanded to do that before they get too strong. And you know, when you look at this document from 2016, which now we have, you know, it's, he's like a prophet. And I asked him with another colleague, Mark Mazzetti from the DC Bureau of the New York Times. We went to see him in one of the enterprises that we wrote, uh, last year. And I said, how come you were different? Because, you know, he saw something that nobody else. So he banged on the table and says, a Russian conspiracy. I understand what conspiracy is. He was, he laughed a bit. But this was of course.
DS: This is for our listeners. He's a, he's the leader, uh, Avigdor Lieberman is the leader of a political party in Israel that has its roots, Russian immigrants.
RB: He was born in Moldova and he's, he's very popular with the Russian immigrants. Now it was, of course. None of this conversation was laughable because he was right. Apparently, nobody listened and he even resigned from his post as a, as a minister of defense two years after. After two years of attempts to convince the military and the prime minister to change their priority and go first against Hamas and only then against Hezbollah. So there was one voice, but if he was winning and Israel would invade Gaza, or preemptively strike Hamas and start the war, there would be a massive opposition that would say that this is all about this crazy Russian immigrants that is fed by conspiracies and he's a warmonger and forced a war that Israel didn't need and didn't want. And would not be forced to go through. This is very hard. And, and of course this will call for a total change of Israeli mindset and Israeli defense strategy. Not just against Hamas, but against everybody.
DS: There's a tendency to have a very binary view. It was a series of bad decisions by the political leadership, by the government. That's one perspective. And then the government and the political leaders. point their fingers at bad intelligence and bad intelligence analysis, and not necessarily sharing all the relevant information with the political decision makers that would have been necessary to change the policy. I think what you're saying is, it's all of the above.
RB: It's all of the above. There's, there's something, something else, which I didn't mention here, but this is the five letters of warnings from the intelligence community to Prime Minister Netanyahu saying that the defragmentation of Israeli society following the so called judicial overhaul, this is weakening the military, but much worse. It's seen by the front of the axis of resistance, Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, as an opportunity to attack Israel because it is weak. And if that continues, one of the members of the resistance front, of the of the radical front would might go and grasp the opportunity. And Netanyahu refused to listen. He even refused to meet the chief of staff. He accused the chief of staff in some kind of a conspiracy against him. Of course, the media and the chief of staff, you know, the front that he usually sees as false. And, it all materialized those warnings.
DS: And to what extent was the momentum behind normalization with Saudi Arabia a catalyst for, in other words, I, I try to understand the sequencing because we knew in fall of ‘23 that the Saudi Israeli normalization was moving along at a pretty fast clip faster, I think than many people realized. Certainly many in the press and the West realized. Did Hamas know it was moving quickly and they wanted to upend it? Did they make this decision before Saudi normalization was getting momentum? And then, how did Saudi normalization fit into their, to the extent that Israeli, your sources now know?
RB: Well, this is still needs to be much thoroughly investigated from the documents, from the interrogations with, Uh, some of the Hamas members that were captured on October 7 or then captured in Gaza, those who were not killed. But, there is some intelligence suggesting, first of all, not even intelligence in the interview that the Hamas leadership in Doha and in Istanbul gave to my colleagues at the New York Times, Ben Hubbard, and Maria Abi-Habib. They said, that they said that the Saudi deal, their interpretation of the Saudi deal, plus other steps of the Israeli government, the current government was that soon if the Saudi deal is executed, then the, the Palestinian issue will be off the world agenda forever. And they said in that interview, which is by the way, an amazing interview because Ben is asking them. What do you say about the war? This is like a month into the war. They said everything goes according to plan. It says according to plan, like, you know, they were like, maybe reported 10,000 Gazans dead and a lot of ruins. They said, yes, this was part of the calculation. So not a wrong risk assessment. This was part of the calculation for what they wanted. They wanted to have a permanent status of war of Israel, with all of its neighbors. And they said, look, now nobody, not just Israel, but nobody in the Middle East can sleep quietly. And about the Gazans, Khalil Al-Hayya, the deputy of Sinwar, gave the most amazing answer, unbelievable answer. He says, We are Qassam military brigade. We are Jihad. We are not here to keep the health services or the electricity or the sewage for the Gazans. We are here to perform Jihad. Now, if I would be, if I was a Gazan and I would read that, I think I would be a little bit, uh, a little bit angry. Like he took the decision for the Gazans. They didn't vote for war or for, you know, everything that they suffered because of the war.
RB: Ronen, we're very focused on what Israel should learn from the lead up to October 7th. But if we turned to Hamas's perspective, given where the war is right now from Sinwar's perspective, what conclusion, and I know this is, you're not in the head of Sinwar, but you are talking to a lot of people who study Sinwar and are trying to make sense of his decisions, his moves, and his thinking. What conclusion do your sources think Sinwar is drawing from how the war is going so far?
RB: So of course, this is a very long war, and if it continues, it's going to be the longest war in the history of Israel. Approaching to longer of the, the war of independence. And there were many developments. And so there's no one clear conclusion that he could have drawn. But starting from the end, and this is also, um, supported by intelligence picked up by Israel, Sinwar feels that now he's in the best minute. In his best minute since the beginning of the war.
DS: Right now.
RB: Right now.
DS: June of 2024.
RB: Because Israel is under tremendous international pressure. Because there is an internal dispute in Israel where the war is going. Because the military supports shifting the attention to the north. Because the Prime Minister is giving promises that he is not able to fulfill. And because of other reasons. And because Israel, for reasons I'm not going to get into now because then we'll sit for another night. Israel relieved itself from most of the cards that it could use in exchange of the hostages.
DS: Meaning
RB: Meaning that Netanyahu refused to speak about the day after because of coalition considerations and he wanted to satisfy the U.S. government became more and more concerned about the humanitarian issue, with something. And instead of negotiating the humanitarian issue, which was the main card and for reasons again complicated to explain now, but for some reason, it's very important to Sinwar, Israel just gave it away with no real sort of reward, or no real exchange.
DS: So Israel made major concessions on the humanitarian side and didn't get anything in return, except perhaps goodwill with the Biden administration.
RB: Of course, but if Netanyahu was negotiating the day after with Saudi, with Egypt, with the Palestinian Authority, maybe losing his coalition along that way, then there could be a settlement or there could be some kind of arrangement that would bring forces to the strip and making a third alternative. So it's not just Hamas or Israel, which is the alternative that any Gazan see now, but there will be a third one. And then Hamas would lose the one thing they're trying to keep, which is the Hamas rule of Gaza. And now Israel understands if it goes out, then the vacuum will be immediately fulfilled by Hamas, because there's no one else. And Hamas is still in a much, much diminished way and bandwidth, but Hamas is still there. So from Sinwar’s point of view, he was successful. Maybe he miscalculated on the dimension of the Israeli response. Maybe he thought it's going to be much limited. Maybe he thought that his success on October 7 would be much reduced. He was surprised from how successful they were. Now, for the last six months, we have been studying the videos that were created by the Nuhba in their phones and in their GoPros, most of them never seen by anyone outside the Israeli intelligence community. And what you see, you see a lot of things, but in the chatter among the Nukhba, they are surprised that they said, here we are for two hours, no airplane! There's no Israeli! You sort of accompany, are embedded with their GoPro along the way along road 232. There is no one. So they were surprised. In a way they were over successful because they were, they got sort of stuck with too many hostages. And the Qataris were very, very mindful of the women and children and, uh, going tough on, on Hamas. So, and, and, and Sinwar was maybe surprised, but at the end, his plan for the tunnels succeeded. Redundancy, surviva. The tunnels were developed for three reasons. One is the ability to maneuver forces from side to side underground. Second is to able to hit Israeli forces or Israeli civilians. And, you know, pop up and go underneath, maybe firing a rocket or firing an RPG. And the third most, most important is defense, defense of the forces with two assumptions. But if Israel invades Hamas doesn't have the capability, not even close to stop an Israeli tank maneuver. Like when you have an Israeli brigade of tanks going into and maneuvering Hamas, maybe he can hit a tank or two, but it will not be able to stop them. What it can do is to gain time and hope that international pressure at a certain point Would force Israel out. It's not, it's not easy for me as an Israeli to say, but if I were Sinwar, I see the materialization of this plan.
DS: We only have a few minutes left and I want to ask you about this question that I hear all the time from Israelis, which was where was the IDF on October 7th? So we talked about the failures that led to October 7th. We talked about some of the missed signals or the failure to interpret signals, perhaps appropriately. Right up to the night between October 6th and October 7th. But then there's the day of. The war starts. The invasion happens. It's not a raid. It's, it's an invasion. It's a war. It's not 70 people at two points on the border, on the barrier, on the fence. It's, you know, 70, as you said. It's war. Where's the IDF?
RB: You know, a few yards from where we are sitting here, the kitchen, in the living room,
DS: In the kitchen, in the living room of Ronen’s home.
RB: Of Janna's and Ronen’s home. And Zofi’s home.
DS: Zofi who you may have heard meowing. Yeah.
RB: Um, my colleague Adam Goldman and myself sat with a high rank officer of the reserves. Very, very trained and experienced, and very critical with the military. Who didn't think for one, one minute. And when he heard what is happening, he took his gun and went to the front. And of course, a gun is, was no good to against what they had, but he took a rifle from, fortunately a body of, of a, of a dead policeman or a dead soldier. Then he fought, he killed two Nukhba on his way. And from that moment on was in the front for many, many months. And he said to us, to Adam Goldman and myself, he said, If in a battle you have many heroes, that means that the battle went very bad. And in October 7th, he says there were many heroes. So maybe looking at this from sort of positive, I'll say that it could have been much worse. How could that be? It could have been much worse. If it wasn't for those heroes, those brave officers or soldiers that just came and fought and arranged more than, but the IDF, the, the, the, the, the, the sad truth is that the IDF defense collapsed. Because Jericho Wall plan was aimed at blinding and paralyzing the defenses throughout the border and then raiding the different main base, the army base throughout the border. Now, the whole strategy of the south of the Gaza border was to have a military facility next to each of the kibbutzim and the communities. So if they are attacked, let's say that there's a raid, there's like a platoon of 70 Nukhba who are coming. So the immediate force that would be launched to help this kibbutz or the other would be from the military base. But once they were all attacked at the same time, and the military bases, they were fighting for their lives. They had nothing that they could do to help the kibbutzim because nobody thought it's going to be across the border. Now the defense strategy of the defense plan, as much as there was one, was about defending from tunnels. It was the old one, like they were, it's called for stationing the forces, like not across the world, but much backwards. But the main thing was this, the attack and the paralyzation of the cameras and the sensors and some of the cell phone towers in the communication. Put the whole, the Gaza Brigade, first
DS: The Gaza Brigade in the IDF.
RB: The IDF. Gaza Brigade is in charge of the defense, of the first line of defense on the Israeli side. And its headquarters in Re'im base was also attacked. And so they had not just the commanders that had needed not just to run the whole defense, but also defend themselves. And for hours, it put the whole Israeli military into a total blindness, confusion. To the extent that one other high ranking officer who just again took he lives in Tel Aviv, he took his gun, took his rifle and went to fight and he ended fighting in Sderot by the police station that was conquered by the and he said to himself, when we were done with the fighting over there, you know, there were no more policemen siege there and all the Nukhba terrorists were basically trapped inside the police station. He said, okay, I thought that. We are the event. And once this is over, it's over. We didn't know that there are like 80 others. And each Of those 80, the Israeli forces that fought there, as much as there were Israeli forces that fought there, thought that this is the story. And the Gaza Brigade was not able to address one of the commanders of the Israeli military, said, let's assume that you have a hospital emergency room that is fully equipped with physicians, with blood, with medicine, with nurses for 10 people and can function. Suddenly you have 1000. Now, of course, this will fail. So, once the brigade, who was ready for a raid of maybe two places, even skeptical about that, and they have 60, they collapse. But then, what didn't happen was that other command groups of the IDF in the Southern Command in Beersheba, or in the subterranean bunker in Tel Aviv. They also were not able to understand the situation and maneuver the forces for a very long time. Jericho Wall is a smart plan because they send forces, the Nukhba, to be on the main junctions. And so everyone tried to cross that junction. I know a guy who lives in Ma’ale Adumim in West Bank. They went, religious, they went to the synagogue. Suddenly they hear the sirens. And after a short while, they understand this, this is bad. He's a reservist in the counter terrorism unit. They went to the base, it's in Adam facility, not far away from Jerusalem. They took equipment. There were no cars. So they start in the car, just driving. And during the way, during while in the way they were given to go to specific kibbutz, but then he says, suddenly in Shara Negev junction, I see someone standing with an RPG firing at us. And then I realized. Then at the beginning, they thought maybe friendly fire, but then they realized that Hamas are in control of the junctions. And so everyone trying to get into road 232, the main road of the border, close to the border, connecting all the different kibbutz even communities was under direct threat of being killed. The forces that were on alert that night as each night since 1974, 1974, a group of terrorists killed, uh, pupils in
DS: Yeah, in Maalot.
RB: In Maalot. So from there, the conclusion was that there needs to be few elite forces on alert every night, ready for something that was codenamed the army of the sky, Tzva Shamayim, which basically said there's a group of terrorists taking hostages and the special force needs to come there as soon as possible, probably by helicopters. And get ready, first of all, like isolate the scene and then maybe start negotiating. It was also a special negotiating team that was established afterwards. So when those special forces were rushing to help this kibbutz or the other, They thought that they need to get to the scene. They didn't understand that they're already in the scene and many of them were killed in their car. And it took a lot of time. There will be more to come and published about what happened and why did forces that were on spot, were not, were waiting for an order to get in and why they were even waiting, why they just didn't thrived for start fighting. This is about the military, the military itself, and there will be a hard and painful conclusions for the military until 20 minutes past six in the morning of that October 7th, that Sabbath, but also 6:20 onwards.
DS: Ronen, we will leave it there. Thank you for hosting me here, uh, in your home. And I hope you'll come back because I feel like we only scratched the surface. And this was incredibly illuminating, but there's still a lot more to get to. So thank you. And I hope to see you again soon.
RB: Thank you. And first of all, thank you for coming. Janna and I are happy to have you all here. And I do hope that next time we meet, we'll have more optimistic assessment towards the future.
DS: I'll take that anytime. Anytime you got a dollop of optimism, you know, call me back. That's, that's what we're here for. We need it.
RB: Thanks.
DS: That's our show for today. To keep up with Ronen Bergman, you can find him on X at Ronen Bergman, and you can also find his work. at Yediot Aharonot and at the New York Times. Call Me Back is produced and edited by Ilan Benatar. Our media manager is Rebecca Strom. Additional editing by Martin Huergo. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.